How He
Thinks
Every influential thinker has a handful of convictions they will not let go. Huryn's are not original to him - he'd be the first to say that - but they are the ones he has tested most thoroughly, argued most persistently, and built his entire teaching practice around.
One of his most repeated arguments: splitting PM and PO roles creates a middleman who owns nothing. PMs need direct, unmediated access to customers, engineers, and business stakeholders. Proxy relationships produce proxy products.
His core operating principle. He refuses to write about strategies he hasn't personally validated. Every framework in The Product Compass has been run through a real product, a real team, or a real customer conversation first.
Not the things you choose to do. The opportunities you choose to ignore. He applies this to products and to his own career: 15+ sponsorships rejected, 15+ podcast invites declined, 10+ job offers turned down.
Roadmaps are communication tools, not feature lists. The goal is to align teams on strategic context and expected outcomes - not to pre-commit to specific features before discovery has even started.
Before a line of code is written, the job is to identify and eliminate risk. Value risk. Usability risk. Feasibility risk. Business viability risk. Tackle those first and success often follows on its own.
The PMs who ignore AI tools are not staying neutral - they're falling behind. His goal: help every subscriber reach the top 10% of AI PMs with measurable, at least 100X ROI from the tools they adopt.
The Long Way
Around
The story of how Paweł Huryn ended up at the top of product management is, like most good origin stories, a study in what he walked away from rather than what he chased.
He started writing code. He was good at it. But at some point he noticed he was more interested in the questions that preceded the code - what should we build? For whom? Why now? - than in the technical execution itself. That instinct drove him from developer to team lead to project manager to co-founder.
He ran a tech startup in Poland for five years as CPO. Not as a figurehead; as the person accountable for whether the product actually worked in the market. When he eventually sold his stake to his co-founder, he took with him something more valuable than an exit: a clear understanding of what product failure looks like up close, and why so many teams repeat the same mistakes.
"The best time to try was yesterday. The next best time is now."
He joined Regiondo, a European B2B platform for activity booking providers, where he worked as a product manager until September 2023. Then came iDeals - virtual data room software used in M&A transactions - where he became Senior Product Manager, leading document permissions and management work that improved customer satisfaction scores in a space where precision is everything.
But the newsletter was growing. The Product Compass, which had started as an extension of his LinkedIn writing habit, was compounding faster than any corporate trajectory he could project. By the time it reached six figures in subscribers, the choice was obvious, even if it wasn't easy.
He went full-time on The Product Compass. He did not take a single sponsor. He did not buy a single ad. He just kept writing, kept building, and kept saying no to the things that would dilute the signal.
The result is a platform that generates an estimated $157,000 per year from reader subscriptions alone, a private community of 1,850+ paying members, four video courses, an AI agent platform for product managers, and multiple open-source tools that developers and PMs discovered organically - one of which gained over 1,300 GitHub stars in its first 72 hours.
In 2024, he co-led a Maven cohort on AI product management with Miqdad Jaffer, Product Lead at OpenAI. The cohort ranked #1 on the Maven platform. That is not a name to drop - that is what happens when a practitioner who spent years building real products sits in a room with someone who helped build the most consequential AI product of our era.
Quotes Worth
Remembering
"Keep your roadmaps simple. Do not try to complicate things because they do not need to be complex. Focus on outcomes not on outputs."
"Product management is hard about managing risk and making sure those risks are addressed before the implementation."
"Success often takes care of itself in many situations if you tackle risks first."
"In 2025, we need to end this madness. Product Owner is not a job title."
"I build with AI and share what works. Start building. Stop theorizing."
"It's extremely difficult to create a roadmap that will contain detailed features before finishing product discovery."